You take the good, you take the bad

Need to catch up? Read the entire series here.

Now that you have a comprehensive schematic of possible causes - and you've delved into each possibility to get to the hidden assumptions that may be driving those causes - it's time to start filtering your options. While it's entirely possible that the scenario you're analyzing could have more than one root cause, you can't fix everything at once; you need to prioritize. In addition, you need to throw out the red herrings. Remember, in the first phase of this process, you accepted any and all possible causes; now you have to take the opposite approach and make each possible cause fight for its life.

You may be wondering how on earth you're supposed to start filtering through the dozens of possibilities, and the answer to your question is this:

Put all the possible causes to the FERCS test.

You remember the FERCS test, don't you? It identifies the characteristics of a root cause.

"But Kathleen," I hear you cry, "how does this test help when there might be a lot of possible causes that meet all of the FERCS criteria?" Ah, grasshopper, what you must do is measure how well each cause meets the FERCS test. To do this, plug the possible causes into a matrix that lets you score them against the criteria.

Rather than make you come up with your own, I've designed a simple matrix that you can download and use freely. The file is an Excel workbook that uses a weighted average score, with the fixable, explains the bad event, and controlled by management scores weighted twice as heavily as the remaining criteria. I've weighted the scoring in that way because my experience has demonstrated that those criteria are the key players in RCA. The tool helps you measure the quality of each cause, and move forward accordingly. Identify a minimum passing FERCS Score, and then eliminate any causes that don't meet that minimum score.

By now, you should have narrowed down your list of possible causes to the mostly likely culprits that are also those you can reasonably expect to correct (and prevent from popping up again). The next post in this series will address developing CAPAs.